I agree that simply blaming the wealthy isn't the solution to these problems, but your perspective regarding the plight of the American poor seems a bit rosy to me.
> We do provide housing for the poor
Waiting lists for both subsidized housing and homeless shelters are overflowing in many places. Have you ever tried to obtain housing as a person with limited resources?
> short term homelessness outcomes are actually generally positive - we tend to get people who lose their home back into another house.
What do you mean by positive? That most people don't stay homeless forever? Sure, that's better than the alternative, but you're ignoring the consequences of becoming homeless in the first place (ex. losing a job because you don't have a place to shower, sleep, or are simply overwhelmed due to your position, eviction records that make it difficult to rent again, exposure to unsafe conditions, etc.), as well as the factors that contribute to that phenomenon.
> community college in most areas is exceedingly affordable with massive scholarship opportunities available for ivy leagues.
Community college is not as cheap as many imagine it to be. Tuition typically runs $3 - 5,000/year, which doesn't include fees, course materials, or, most notably, living expenses. Financial aid isn't as generous as many would expect - as you'll see below, a grocery store clerk earning $22,646/year would receive less than $1,500 in grant aid (while being expected to contribute ~ $4,700/annually). Loans can help, but they can also become a considerable burden, especially for the 47% percent of college students who don't end up graduating within six years (or, ever, for the majority of those students). [10] Perhaps surprisingly, the typical community college graduate actually takes around 5.5 (calendar) years to earn their associate's degree (assuming no participation in "dual enrollment"). [11] If they continue on to earn their bachelor's degree, the overall process typically takes more than 8 (calendar) years. [11] That's a long time to be in a financially-tenuous position.
I may as well ignore your comment regarding the Ivy League, as the amount of poor Americans who will find it relevant is virtually zero.
> You can walk into any hospital and it's illegal for them to refuse you treatment.
...for them to refuse you treatment for a life-threatening injury, not regular checkups, non-essential treatment or preventative medicine. And if you are treated for an emergency, you'll be billed for it later. Although the ACA has made things much better for Americans, you can't simply walk into a hospital and expect free healthcare without health insurance.
> What's the difference between your local grocery store clerk, and a Hollywood actor?
> They both likely have cars, homes and an iphone.
If your grocery-store clerk is a middle/upper-middle class teenager whose parents give them those things, sure. Otherwise, this assumption seems pretty unrealistic to me. Some quick googling seems to confirm my assessment...
According to Glassdoor, the average American grocery clerk makes $22,646/year ($1,532/month) after taxes. [1] Abodo says that rent for the median one-bedroom apartment in the US cost $1,078/month last year. [2] That doesn't include utilities, which average around $240/month for renters. [3] That leaves your grocery clerk with $214 to use for all additional expenses each month. Owning a (cheap) car costs around $486/month overall, according to Nerdwallet (including a $111 monthly car payment [4] and $118 for car insurance [5], plus misc. expenses). [6] Now this grocery clerk is going $272 further into debt each month. If they want an iPhone and a ("cheap") phone plan from a major carrier, that will cost an additional $90/month (assuming they buy the cheapest iPhone 11 and keep it for two years - $700 / 24 - and opt for the cheapest standard phone plan [7]). At that point, they're spending $362 more than they earn every month and they haven't even spent anything on food, household goods, clothing, entertainment, or education!
Assuming this person wanted to improve their financial situation by attending community college (average tuition: $3,660 for 2018/2019 year [8]), they'd be eligible to receive around $1400 in Federal Pell Grants (depending on their state) and up to $1,465 in Federal Work-study benefits (assuming their college participated in the program and that they could manage working two jobs while going to school full-time), plus up to $9,500 in Direct Stafford Loans (note: not dischargeable through bankruptcy). [9] However, they would still be expected to contribute around $4,700/year toward their education.
> However, nothing about its existence implies anything about police brutality.
As I read it, the article didn't seem to be implying that the existence of "excited delirium" itself implies something about police brutality. I took their argument to be that police departments' misapplication and/or overuse of the concept had led to increased instances police brutality. Not knowing anything else about this issue, it doesn't seem implausible to me that training police officers, who generally lack medical diagnostic skills, to constantly anticipate a human threat with superhuman strength and no sense of pain might lead to an increase in the use of excessive force.
> But in those deaths where there was no drug use and the toxicology came back negative, the only common denominator in virtually every case was the involvement of law enforcement, such as in the case of Gregory Lloyd Edwards.
> According to the autopsy report, Edwards died of "excited delirium and complications" due to "hyperactive and violent state with subsequent restraint."
WaPo:
"Police keep using ‘excited delirium’ to justify brutality. It’s junk science."
HN: ‘Excited delirium’, used by police to justify brutality, is junk science
Both of which are accurate statements of the key point: There is a body of junk science based on the concept of ‘Excited delirium’, used to justify plice brutality.
The fact that there is something referred to as ‘Excited delirium’ that is not used for police brutality or junk science, doesn't make the title clickbait.
Astrology is junk science, despite the fact that the constellations do exist and that a person is born under a certain configuration of stars ar the location of their birth.
This is a purely moral judgement - you can argue, in the most extremal case, that every aspect of a person's behavior is purely "circumstantial". After all, your personality and capabilities are entirely shaped by circumstances like genetics and life experience.
Of course, we understand this is a pretty useless way of looking at things.
From a consequentialist standpoint, the incentives work out the best when we use the heuristic of assigning responsibility for low labor value to the person performing the labor, so that's the approximation I choose to use. You could choose to think that e.g. being very stupid is no one's fault, so a very stupid person should get paid as much as a brilliant doctor, but the net social consequences of this are pretty well explored and pretty bad.
You should read the article. In short, she didn't actually ignore the court's order to meet her academic obligations.
A law could be harsh, but fair, sure. However, an excessively harsh law is not fair, nor is an inconsistently-enforced one. This situation ticks both of those boxes.
> Being ordered to do her homework was a weak sanction, she ignored it, so she needs a stronger stimulus.
This simple-minded, old-fashioned line of thinking is out of touch with contemporary scholarship and a major contributor to the US criminal justice system's inefficacy.
> the probation conditions are part of the sentence and the reason why she wasn't incarcerated in the first place.
In this case, I think that she wasn't incarcerated in the first place because her crimes weren't severe enough to warrant incarceration. A 15-yr-old girl stealing (then returning) a cell phone or pulling her mom's hair and biting her finger isn't going to jail in the 21st century.
> They'll just revoke your probation and wash their hands of it.
In many states, violating probation can carry its own penalties in addition to those from the offense that led to probation. Therefore, probation being revoked doesn't have to mean restoring a prior term of incarceration (which may not exist), and punishment for probation violations can exceed that of the offense which led to probation in the first place.
> Nobody in the criminal incarceration system wants to be the one who showed leniency to someone who later turned out to commit some headlining crime. So, nobody is incentivized to help you out even for the most minor of infractions.
I think that understanding the incentives in play here is essential to understanding how the system works, and I also think those incentives go beyond not wanting to look soft on crime. In particular, both prosecutors and law enforcement officers can make themselves look better on paper by putting more people behind bars, regardless of the actual impact of their actions (or even their action's legality, in some cases). I'm reminded of a case in which a Florida police chief repeatedly framed innocent people in order to boost his department's clearance rate. [1] I don't see how we can make meaningful changes to the system without addressing that type of perverse incentive.
> As well, a person is free not to agree to the terms, and just do their time.
In a case like this, there's no "time" to do. It's not as if this girl narrowly avoided incarceration on the condition that she agree to probation. Probation was the "time." Her offenses didn't qualify for a term of incarceration.
Really? Probably not, if you're talking about her actual offenses and not simply "assault" and "theft" in the abstract. Her age, coupled with the relatively minor nature of her specific offenses (taking a phone from a fellow student's locker, but ultimately returning it; taking a school iPad home without permission; pulling her mother's hair and biting a finger - i.e. not a premeditated attack using lethal force) point to the type of situation she was already in - probation. Plenty of kids have done much worse and never even enter the "system."
Unfortunately (or fortunately, I guess, if you're a sadist), an artifact of the American criminal justice system is the potential for probation violations to result in punishment which exceeds that of the original offense.
> ? Probably not, if you're talking about her actual offenses and not simply "assault" and "theft" in the abstract.
There is no "Probably". This is a statement of fact. The crimes were serious enough that they justified a prison sentence. The criminal was trialed, found guilty by a jury, and sentenced.
Just because the criminal was put on probation that doesn't mean the crimes committed by the criminal weren't serious offenses.
Either I'm missing something or you must be confused. It's extremely unlikely that a young teenager would be sent to "prison" in the US for the crimes that landed the girl in the article, "Grace," on probation. I used the word "probably" only to account for unlikely possibility that, given the variation in sentencing across US jurisdictions, a place exists where this might occur.
> This is a statement of fact. The crimes were serious enough that they justified a prison sentence.
This is obviously untrue. Did you read the article or any of the related news coverage? Grace's crimes were not punishable by a prison term.
> The criminal was trialed, found guilty by a jury, and sentenced.
Where are you getting this false information? Grace was not tried and found guilty by a jury. In fact, she wasn't even tried in a regular courtroom - this entire process took place in family court. [1] For reference - out of almost 24,000 2018 Michigan family court cases involving juvenile offenders, less than 0.01% went to trial (of those, only 12 - 0.0005% - were jury trials). [2]
Why are you making this stuff up?
1 - Family courts exist to solve legal problems involving youth and their parents.
> If you've been put away for committing crimes, and the conditions for staying free...
Abstraction is often useful, but its application here seems reductionist to the point of being deceptive.
This 15-yr-old girl (Grace) was not "put away for committing crimes" - she didn't narrowly avoid incarceration, then violate the terms of her parole. She wasn't "put away," in the first place, because her "crimes" weren't worthy of incarceration.
She got in a fight (hair-pulling and biting a finger) with her mother - who's currently distraught that her daughter's not at home - and stole a cellphone (which was later returned) from a schoolmate's locker.
> If ... the conditions for staying free are doing your homework, you _better_ do you homework.
Grace was allegedly locked up for not doing her schoolwork, however her caseworker later mentioned that they didn't actually know (or even attempt to check) whether or not her academic requirements were being met. Additionally, her teacher stated that her performance was in line with most of the other students in her class (despite her losing the extra academic support she received due to her ADHD when her school switched to online classes). In any case, she had definitely not failed to meet the academic requirements dictated by her school. I wonder how her studies are going now that she's locked up.
I don't think the title seems "clickbaity" - I think your comment seems like a callous and misleading apology for authoritarianism. It brings to mind the "Black Codes" [1] that were passed throughout the South, following the U.S. Civil War - specifically policies related to vagrancy laws [2] and convict leasing [3] - whereby many black Americans were legally kept in conditions similar to those of their prior enslavement. By making it illegal to exist without a proven means of support (frequently only attainable via employment on the plantations of former slaveholders), and instituting forced labor as a punishment for committing said crime, Southern states were able to partially perpetuate their antebellum social and economic structure.
Put differently, If you've been put away for not working the cotton fields, and the conditions for staying free are working the cotton fields, you_better_work the cotton fields.
You should really read the article. Even though it is terribly biased, it is still clear that the teenager in question was put on probation for having been found guilty of having committed some crime, and as part of the requirements to be placed on probation the teenager was expected to attend school and meet academic requirements.
Yet, the teenager failed to comply with those requirements, and therefore violated the terms of the probation.
Consequently, the teen was jailed for having committed crimes.
I did read the article (I’m not sure what you mean by “it is terribly biased”). I don’t think anyone here is questioning the logical chain of events that led to this girl’s incarceration (I.e. arrest -> probation -> violation -> incarceration). Presumably, anyone participating in this forum is able to read.
The reason this is newsworthy is that the punishment seems completely out of proportion with the “crime.” That remains true whether you consider the crime to be not doing schoolwork (her teacher said, by the way, that her performance was similar to most of her other students) or fighting with her mother (pulling her hair and biting her finger) and stealing a fellow student’s cell phone.
What’s worse, although she was supposedly incarcerated for not doing her schoolwork, her caseworker filed a probation violation after she went back to sleep after checking in for the day - not even bothering to check whether she was keeping up with her academic requirements. Her caseworker also admitted that they knew nothing about the her educational disability or the accommodations she received because of it. Further, in response to Covid—19, the court that decided to lock her up was supposed to be hearing only “essential emergency matters,” and the governor of her state had encouraged courts to send children home. Despite this, her case (based on a misunderstanding) was apparently deemed an “essential emergency matter” and her presence in the outside world considered risky enough to defy the governor’s recommendation.
To me, this seems like an incredibly callous miscarriage of justice facilitated by ignorance, incompetence, and negligence at multiple levels. The fact that some authority has the power to exercise their authority in a certain way has no bearing on whether that exercise of power is morally justified, else we’d consider the actions of history’s most oppressive regimes just.
> We do provide housing for the poor
Waiting lists for both subsidized housing and homeless shelters are overflowing in many places. Have you ever tried to obtain housing as a person with limited resources?
> short term homelessness outcomes are actually generally positive - we tend to get people who lose their home back into another house.
What do you mean by positive? That most people don't stay homeless forever? Sure, that's better than the alternative, but you're ignoring the consequences of becoming homeless in the first place (ex. losing a job because you don't have a place to shower, sleep, or are simply overwhelmed due to your position, eviction records that make it difficult to rent again, exposure to unsafe conditions, etc.), as well as the factors that contribute to that phenomenon.
> community college in most areas is exceedingly affordable with massive scholarship opportunities available for ivy leagues.
Community college is not as cheap as many imagine it to be. Tuition typically runs $3 - 5,000/year, which doesn't include fees, course materials, or, most notably, living expenses. Financial aid isn't as generous as many would expect - as you'll see below, a grocery store clerk earning $22,646/year would receive less than $1,500 in grant aid (while being expected to contribute ~ $4,700/annually). Loans can help, but they can also become a considerable burden, especially for the 47% percent of college students who don't end up graduating within six years (or, ever, for the majority of those students). [10] Perhaps surprisingly, the typical community college graduate actually takes around 5.5 (calendar) years to earn their associate's degree (assuming no participation in "dual enrollment"). [11] If they continue on to earn their bachelor's degree, the overall process typically takes more than 8 (calendar) years. [11] That's a long time to be in a financially-tenuous position.
I may as well ignore your comment regarding the Ivy League, as the amount of poor Americans who will find it relevant is virtually zero.
> You can walk into any hospital and it's illegal for them to refuse you treatment.
...for them to refuse you treatment for a life-threatening injury, not regular checkups, non-essential treatment or preventative medicine. And if you are treated for an emergency, you'll be billed for it later. Although the ACA has made things much better for Americans, you can't simply walk into a hospital and expect free healthcare without health insurance.
> What's the difference between your local grocery store clerk, and a Hollywood actor?
> They both likely have cars, homes and an iphone.
If your grocery-store clerk is a middle/upper-middle class teenager whose parents give them those things, sure. Otherwise, this assumption seems pretty unrealistic to me. Some quick googling seems to confirm my assessment...
According to Glassdoor, the average American grocery clerk makes $22,646/year ($1,532/month) after taxes. [1] Abodo says that rent for the median one-bedroom apartment in the US cost $1,078/month last year. [2] That doesn't include utilities, which average around $240/month for renters. [3] That leaves your grocery clerk with $214 to use for all additional expenses each month. Owning a (cheap) car costs around $486/month overall, according to Nerdwallet (including a $111 monthly car payment [4] and $118 for car insurance [5], plus misc. expenses). [6] Now this grocery clerk is going $272 further into debt each month. If they want an iPhone and a ("cheap") phone plan from a major carrier, that will cost an additional $90/month (assuming they buy the cheapest iPhone 11 and keep it for two years - $700 / 24 - and opt for the cheapest standard phone plan [7]). At that point, they're spending $362 more than they earn every month and they haven't even spent anything on food, household goods, clothing, entertainment, or education!
Assuming this person wanted to improve their financial situation by attending community college (average tuition: $3,660 for 2018/2019 year [8]), they'd be eligible to receive around $1400 in Federal Pell Grants (depending on their state) and up to $1,465 in Federal Work-study benefits (assuming their college participated in the program and that they could manage working two jobs while going to school full-time), plus up to $9,500 in Direct Stafford Loans (note: not dischargeable through bankruptcy). [9] However, they would still be expected to contribute around $4,700/year toward their education.
1. https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/grocery-clerk-salary-SRCH...
2. https://www.abodo.com/blog/2019-annual-rent-report/
3. https://www.apartmentlist.com/renter-life/average-utility-bi...
4. Calculated using https://www.cars.com/car-loan-calculator/ (assuming $5,000 car price/$500 down payment/7% sales tax/4.67% interest rate/48 month term)
5. Assuming average American cost in 2020 https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/car-insurance/average-co...
6. https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/total-co...
7. https://www.consumerreports.org/cell-phone-service-providers...
8. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/12/tuition-at-community-college...
9. Calculated using above income info via https://fafsa.ed.gov/spa/fafsa4c/#/landing (Note: "Expected Family Contribution" (EFC) ended up being around $4,700/year)
10. https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/freshman-year/just-over-half...
11. https://nscresearchcenter.org/signaturereport11/